Posted
by
samzenpuson Tuesday January 10, 2012 @11:48AM
from the looks-like-you've-been-missing-a-lot-of-work-lately dept.

theodp writes "The USPTO appears to have lowered the bar on obviousness, awarding a patent to IBM Tuesday for its System for Portion of a Day Out of Office Notification. 'Out of office features in existing applications such as Lotus Notes, IBM Workplace, and Microsoft Outlook all implement a way to take a number of days off from one day to many days,' acknowledges purported patent reformer Big Blue. 'Yet, none of these applications contain the feature of letting a person take a half-day or in more general terms, x days and x hours off.' Eureka! And yes, the invention is every bit as obvious as you can imagine."

I am not sure of the name of the package.. but it has a web interface that you can use to check how many days you have available and to apply for time off. I can use that to not just request a 1/2 day, but also to request just a few hours.

Does this mean we (and whoever created our HR software) have to sue IBM? Or can we just ask for a cut when they start collecting license fees on this patent?

thanks, I was about to post the same damn thing. I just used this feature last week for a partial day notification and was worried my head would explode when I read the summary! Not sure how far back this goes but as of Outlook 2007 it's there. LOL maybe IBM is still using Notes or some old version of Outlook.

It's worth noting that while the USPTO just GRANTED the patent, it was filed back in 2006. I was all set to join the pile-on -- Outlook 2011 on the Mac has this feature -- but I can't recall Outlook, at least, having this feature back in 2006.

Why does anybody owe anybody any money at all for something so completely obvious?:)

The fact that is has not been used before does not mean it was not extremely obvious on how to do it. If I needed to code an auto-responder for something specific like an out-of-office message it would have been by default from 01/10/2012 00:00:00 to 01/10/2012 11:59:59 if I stored it as a timestamp. Adding some dropdown boxes to add the time would make it work instantly since if statement, or SQL statement like between,

If it was actually in Outlook 2007, it had to have been under implementation in 2006, meaning it was already thought out.

Then there's the incredible obviousness. All IBM did was take an existing feature and tweak the granularity a bit. Can I evade the patent by allowing any increment except for exactly half a day? (so you can take 3 hours 59 minutes or 4 hours 1 minute)

Well, my screenshot was from Outlook 2007, so it's been around since then (released in Jan 07). The patent was filed in September 2006.My question is why it took 6 years to look at and grant the patent? We've now got countless mail clients that now use this as a standard feature.Have IBM been warning them they have a Patent Pending on this (or other, as yet ungranted) item? What happens to all these mail clients? How much will IBM be charging for use of this patent? What if they can't/wont pay up?

I am not sure of the name of the package.. but it has a web interface that you can use to check how many days you have available and to apply for time off. I can use that to not just request a 1/2 day, but also to request just a few hours.

Our time entry system at work (again, no idea what the name is) allows us to simply enter a number of hours.

We can enter decimals, so I've taken "1.25" hours of flex time before... and I can separately access how much vacation and flex time I have. At a previous job, we

Does this mean we (and whoever created our HR software) have to sue IBM? Or can we just ask for a cut when they start collecting license fees on this patent?

No. It's a valid US patent.It means that IBM can sue whoever created your HR software and get an injunction to stop its sale in the US. Whoever makes your HR software would then need to fight IBM and a team of wicked sharp lawyers in court, and convince a bunch of dumb-fucks in East Texas, who have nothing better to do for three months than sit in a jury for $12 / day, that the patent isn't valid do to prior art or obviousness.

Thank god for these inventions! The system wouldn't let me take a half day before.
You must be on salary. You can't take a half-day off if you are on salary. If you worked at all, it was not a day off.

Boss: Uh why were you not at the office between 12 and 4?Me: I had to go to the datacenter.Boss: For what?Me: The EPS conduits were all gunked up because the flux capacitor in the power converter was 3 degrees out of phase.Boss: Ok. Isn't that what happened to my laptop last week?Me: Yes, but this was not caused by porn.

Yeah, no kidding. Where I work we use MS Outlook/Exchange (formerly Oracle, I can't believe we could actually find something that's a downgrade from THAT, but we managed), MS Project and an open source vacation/leave request system. ALL of these have the features mentioned above, and have for YEARS.

Ok, they don't have a drop-down box or something idiotic like that, if that is part of the patent, but for outlook/exchange, I set my away message to show up when I will leave the office (say, noon 2012-01-12), I

Sometimes I think the USPTO approves this kind of patent as a sort of protest; just to get attention and force Congress to give them rules allowing them to reject "obvious" inventions and reference prior art other than publications.

Actually, the Patent Office folks have explained this publicly in the past. Their motive isn't to get rules and definitions from Congress. They agree that such things should be the Patent Office's job. Their motive is to get Congress to fund the required work. Some years back, when Congress passed the laws that radically expanded what could be patented, Congress also cut back on Patent Office funding. The Patent Office can't do the "obvious" checking of patent applications, because they can't legally hire (and train) the people that the job has required for the past decade or so. The flood of patent applications has become an astronomical number.

The Patent Office folks made it pretty clear back then that their only possible approach was something that historians will find familiar: Approve them all, and let the Courts sort them out. Essentially, funding for patent examination has been moved into the Private Sector, aka the lawyers. This has, of course, radically increased the cost of a patent application, because the court system simply wasn't designed for this sort of task, and patent lawyers cost a lot more than patent examiners.

As long as our political system remains in its current "privatization is the way to go" state, this is not likely to change. And if you're complaining about the way that the current patent system is a dead weight on economic development, you should understand that that's exactly its function. A patent is a tool for limiting use of a bit of technology to someone who can afford to defend the patent. That's intentional, and it has always been used by the big guys against the little guys. The only way to fix it is to limit what can be patented. A decade back, the US Congress took exactly the opposite approach, and radically expanded what was patentable. They did this knowingly, to limit access to technology to the big guys (aka campaign contributors;-). This isn't going to be fixed as long as the crowd that did that is still running the US Congress.

(Well, OK, there's an outside chance that the courts might cancel those laws on obvious Constitutional grounds. Anyone want to make a wager on when that might happen, how much the appeal process will cost, or how many years it'll take?;-)

You say this is "something historians will find familiar". Great! So it was a temporary problem last time? When was that, how did it end, how long did it take? Any citation? I'd love to read about this, especially the part about how it got better.

Maybe I was a bit too subtle. What I was thinking of was the old slogan "Kill them all and let God sort them out." You sometimes run across variants of this, all of the form "_____ them all and let _____ sort them out." It's sorta the ultimate trope for cynical characterization of someone else's attitude toward a problem.

For the current topic, we might similarly suggest that the approach of the big corporations amounts to "Patent everything and let our teams or corporate lawyers sort it out in cour

[...] their only possible approach was something that historians will find familiar: Approve them all, and let the Courts sort them out.

I don't see how that's the only possible approach. Seems to me, a far better approach would have been to check each thoroughly and accumulate a huge backlog. That would have created pressure to hire more examiners, and would have lowered the incentive to file more patents.

The Supreme Court didn't hear a software patent case from 1981 to 2008 and in those years the district courts essentially created software patents.

Not district courts - the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Sometimes called the "12th Circuit". And during those two decades, the Supreme Court declined hearing a bunch of appeals because they thought the lower court's decision was correct.

... where would you want to take it to? Wouldn't you rather just flush it, like the rest of us?

Or are you one of those "Emma, come 'n look at this - you ain't gonna believe it!" types?

"Method and system for taking a crap."

1. Eat food (see our related patent application for "Method and system for eating food";
2. Wait. (period of time depends on food eaten and any contamination such as salmonella, see our related patents and our "brown paper"

that was under 'first to invent' not 'first to file'. the current system will work the way you described. this patent however will require a trial with discovery and proving who invented it first.

No, it won't. First-to-file vs. first-to-invent changes one procedure: interferences under 35 USC 102(g). Only about 20 occur per year, and it's when two independent inventors simultaneously apply for a patent on the same thing. It has nothing to do with prior art. Stop spreading FUD.

Despite the summary, the patent describes a particular specific application, where every aspect of the system is based around minute-granularity timestamps, rather than mere dates. The application also follows a particular architecture, which is all nicely explained in the actual patent itself. The half-day example was just mentioned for clarity, and does not affect the patent itself.

I was going to state how even our in house payroll software lets us put in for portions of a days leave, but then I realised this is about automated out of office notifications - and I'd have to admit, obvious as it is most of the ones I've seen work with dates, not portions of dates.

I may not remember correctly, but doesn't Office 2007 and above have an option where you can set what time to enable/disable the out of office message? That would seem to cover this patent. When was the application made?

What do folks at the USPTO do, exactly? You would think any reasonably-intelligent person would reject this on obviousness grounds and not even need to find prior art.

I may not remember correctly, but doesn't Office 2007 and above have an option where you can set what time to enable/disable the out of office message? That would seem to cover this patent. When was the application made?

First-to-file doesn't change anything about prior art. All it does away with is interferences under 35 USC 102(g) where two independent inventors simultaneously file patent applications on the exact same invention. Previously, there was a big, expensive fight over who was really the first to invent. Now (actually, in a year when it gets implemented), the one with the first filing date will win.

This is a rare procedure - there are currently about 20 interferences total per year... out of half a million appl

Where's the payoff for the avalanche of poor patents? IBM isn't getting paid, the USPTO isn't better off, so are the politicians getting paid? Why is this system continuing? Two reasons I can see: protection for the largest companies against new start-ups, and getting foreign countries to adopt US Patent laws and extort their corporations. But is that really it, is that the whole game? IBM isn't full of idiots and the politicians are (always) working an angle, so why this continued patent madness?

Where's the payoff for the avalanche of poor patents? IBM isn't getting paid, the USPTO isn't better off, so are the politicians getting paid? Why is this system continuing? Two reasons I can see: protection for the largest companies against new start-ups, and getting foreign countries to adopt US Patent laws and extort their corporations. But is that really it, is that the whole game? IBM isn't full of idiots and the politicians are (always) working an angle, so why this continued patent madness?

The payoff is selling it as part of a portfolio of patents to cover other equally obvious stuff, like they're doing with Google now. Jeebus, our IP system is broken!

The payoff is selling it as part of a portfolio of patents to cover other equally obvious stuff, like they're doing with Google now.

Selling to the next sucker is one way to get paid, but that happens in every market and isn't special to patents. Maybe it's just momentum that keeps the system running: we've spent so much on patents we can't stop now! Like the housing boom where the market prices reinforce the system, and it doesn't stop until enough people say the emperor has no clothes, then it all crashes at once.

IBM will be sued the moment the PTO grants a similar patent application to another company, so they file first.

As long as it passes the "will the PTO grant this?" threshold, IBM files it. They have to file it, because five years later someone else will attempt to patent the same feature. The PTO will issue the patent in due course, and sometime later a patent troll company will buy the patent and source code (like SCO). Presto IBM will be sued for billions of dollars for violating patents and copyright

Protection against patent trolls is just an effect of the system, but how does the system payoff for IBM or the USA? Protection for IBM could also be bought by paying a few politicians to change patent law, but that isn't happening. So where's the payoff?

IBM filing trivial patents for defensive reasons? Please, that's a joke. Filing a patent does not defend against attack from a troll. You cannot file all possible patents any more than you can claim all possible combinations of letters. A billion patents is still 0% of infinity.

IBM file trivial patents because they make $$$ from patent licenses. The director of the USPTO, Dave Kappos, was chief patent lawyer at IBM. It is a pure case of regulatory capture. IBM *own* the US patent system, file 50% of all sof

You're right that patent trolls can't be stopped by playing the patent game, but If we assume that "IBM *owns* the US patent system" why aren't we seeing competitors bribing politicians to change the rules? The lack of large companies demanding change suggests they're OK with the current system, but where's their payoff?

Inventors may get an award or bonus for a filed / granted patent. So that's a quantity over quality incentive. Patent lawyers get paid for getting patents filed, accepted, attacked, defended, etc. again, quantity over quality. In fact, patent lawyers make more when there is post-award litigation whether or not they're on the offense or defense. Even more quantity-over-quality incentive.

If you think IBM isn't getting paid a ton licensing its war chest of patents you're crazy.

Licensing fees paid will be in proportion to the number of patents and lawyers, but other large companies have to pay those fees, so why aren't they fighting to get the patent system fixed? Unless IBM (et al.) are extorting foreign companies, the system isn't a boon for the USA, and we should be seeing serious efforts to get the system fixed.

The real reason to go for as many patents as possible is to have as many legal weapons as possible to bludgeon and gut any up and comers with a competing product.

Protection for the largest companies against new start-ups is one advantage, but they get that protection from the politicians *much* cheaper then the current patent s

Making money off the patents for IBM is a nice benefit but I believe ultimately this is being driven by companies needing to cross license IP. I worked at a company where we cross licensed IP with IBM and whoever had a bigger stack of patents would not pay anything and the other company would pay based on the relative difference in size of the stacks. We had incentives for engineers to patent our IP so that our stack would be bigger and the negotiations would be more favorable.

A good chunk of these BS/trivial patents stem from devs gaming the system.

Many corporations, and I imagine IBM is one of them, have patent bounties that are paid out in a multi-tier system:- propose a patent application that passes the internal corporate review board: small $ bonus- get the patent app files: bigger $ bonus- have the patent granted: big $ bonus

I've known a few devs who have made a nice chunk of change in annual bonuses because they've learned the system. From devs on the line, through manage

The patent office's real job is to keep all of society locked in their cubes, think of dumb things that produce nothing but will make a ton of money, forget that society even exists, and depend solely on food delivery and masturbation for survival. So, let us patent "method for masturbation." Yes, the traditional one. What, me invent something?

If companies don't patent every possible angle of everything then a troll will get that patent and go on the attack. The patent office has lowered the bar to the point that everything and anything is patentable and MUST be patented for self protection. This patent is purely the fault of Congress for ignoring the patent offices downward spiral to economic zombie. Braaaaains! Braaaaaaaaains!

Just because other people can think of an invention does not mean the patent should not be filed. A patent is largely about someone creating something novel nobody has thought of, or more likely got their patent filed first in the case where the invention is easily repeatable.

What should rule out a patent is previous art. If someone else implemented this feature prior to IBM filing for the patent, or it can be proven that someone else implemented this feature before an IBM product implemented the feature,

You're right but you miss the real point.Companies like IBM, and especially Microsoft file patents already knowing they are without merit and that prior art exists.

The root cause of the problem is with the US legal system, being so slow and expensive to come to a final decision on anything at all.

For a small company suspected of being in breach of a patent, even a frivolous one, companies like IBM can generate so much bogus legal activity to totally bankrupt smaller competitors with ongoing legal costs alon

The standard defense against this type of claim-without-support is that if it were obvious, and given that there are _lots_ of eyeballs on the subject matter, and given that it is highly useful, then someone would have already done it. Therefore, since nobody has done it before, it was not obvious.

The "it's obvious" rant is almost universal when someone sees an idea that they (a) know is good, and (b) understand. As an inventor and generall

You remind me of the parable of Colombus going into a bar and being given grief for discovering new lands. "Anyone could have done that... its obvious" say the patrons. And Colombus then proceeds to challenge anyone there to stand an egg on end. The patrons try as they may, the egg always rolls to its side and never stands straight. "It's impossible" they say. "Not impossible!" says Colombus, as he smashes the bottom of the egg to force it to stand on end, "merely not obvious." And then, of course, the patr

Four years ago I and the person who was going to replace me when I retired built a TimeRecs app that kept track of partial vacation or time off days for any dates and times in the future as well. It was build using APEX and dynamic HTML, so employees could access it with their browsers.